Knotty
by Missing Summer
Summary: Ronald Weasley doesn't think that Hermione Granger looks quite right unless her hair is swirling around her in a mess of curls and frizz. Before the trio leave for the Horcrux hunt, Ron finds his mind drifting to those curls and doesn't know what to do.


_Disclaimer: None of the characters belong to me. Deathly Hallows Compliant, as well as Nineteen Years Later compliant. Intended as a __**Companion Piece **__to my other story, _Weasley is Our King, _but can be read alone. Takes place in the weeks before the Horcrux hunt, when Hermione was staying with the Weasleys before the wedding. Enjoy!_

**Knotty**

One thing that Ronald Weasley loved about being home for the summer holiday, excluding the return to his mum's brilliant cooking three or four times a day, and an end to Potions assignments for good this time, was the many opportunities it gave him to see Hermione Granger before she brushed her hair in the morning. He really couldn't explain it if he had wanted to, which he surely didn't, but he always had thought that his best friend looked much better when her curly hair was a complete mess in the morning, then when she used that girly Sleek-Easy's potion to make it lie flat and ordinary. He supposed that he felt this way because, well, when her hair was a mess, tossed every which way from her sleepless nights, Hermione looked a lot more like she had when they had first become friends. Her messy hair reminded him of the times when he had been most proud of being her friend--like when she had saved him from that strangling, evil, bloody plant back in first year, or when she had punched Malfoy square in the jaw in third year. When Hermione was at her bravest, her cleverest, and, if he must be quite honest, her most beautiful, it has always been with her long, bushy brown hair swirling around her, completely tangled and wrong and wonderful.

Seeing her like this, in the bleary, sun-drenched mornings of summer at the Burrow, always seemed to remind Ron that Hermione Granger wasn't like other girls. Not only was she brilliant and his best friend, and nothing like Lavender Brown, but she just didn't seem as wholly put-together and careful as other girls did, even his younger sister Ginny. She just never looked quite right to him with her hair all in place, and so, that summer during the short weeks before Bill and Fleur's wedding, he found himself waking earlier and earlier in the day, with the vague and unexplained hope of seeing Hermione before she had gotten a chance to grab a brush or comb and run it through her tousled hair. And this meant that he himself was losing sleep, and could be found down at the breakfast table a full hour before much of his household had awoken. It would just be him and Pig--who would fly around his head in dizzy circles, attempting to lure him back to sleep. And that was how, one morning in early July, Hermione Granger stumbled upon a snoring and thoroughly asleep Ron Weasley at the breakfast table, his head resting face-down next to a bowl of cold porridge.

When he awoke minutes later to the sound of her heating up his porridge on the stove the Muggle way, his face flushed a deep red, and he wished with all his might that he was dreaming, and that he hadn't just been caught snoring loudly with his head smashed against the oak table by the very girl he had been hoping to see. That was, until he got a good look at her, her back turned to him as she stirred his breakfast with a wooden spoon, and realized that he had gotten what he had been waiting for. For Hermione's hair was distinctly bedraggled, with individual light brown curls spiraling out in different directions, and the overall shape incredibly lopsided. He smiled openly, rose from his creaky chair at the table, and walked up behind her, placing his hand on her shoulder to alert her to his conscious presence, and whispered a, "Thanks, Hermione" in her ear. And that was when Ron Weasley discovered something even better than seeing Hermione Granger with her hair in a mess--seeing Hermione Granger sporting the signature Weasley blush.

Bloody brilliant.

Fin.


End file.
